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[History] An editor letter by Edsger Dijkstra, titled: "go to statements considered harmful" (march 1968). (dl.acm.org)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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In this letter, Dijkstra talks about readability and maintainability in a time where those topics were rarely talked about (1968). This letter was one of the main causes why modern programmers don't have to trouble themselves with goto statements. Older languages like Java and C# still have a (discouraged) goto statement, because they (mindlessly) copied it from C, which (mindlessly) copied it from Assembly, but more modern languages like Swift and Kotlin don't even have a goto statement anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

For C it makes sense. The point of C is that it can work as a low level language. Basically, everything doable with assembly SHOULD be doable with C, and that's why we don't need another low level language that's basically C with goto.

Even though almost all of C users should never use goto.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

C is one of the few languages where using goto makes sense as a poor man's local error/cleanup handler.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. Without a proper error handling mechanism, goto is actually useful for once.

[–] pkill 1 points 6 months ago

Still don't get why Go simultaneously picked this and introduced defer